Keep promises to low-income students and schools

When I began teaching in California in the late 1990s, I was appalled by the conditions for students and teachers. So many of the resources I had taken for granted on the East Coast were missing in my high-poverty San Francisco school. Unfortunately, the situation only grew worse over the past 15 years, especially during the long budget crisis when school districts stripped away supports for disadvantaged students, such as summer school and reading specialists. Little wonder that California has some of the largest achievement gaps in the nation.

The recent passage of Governor Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) is supposed to fix these conditions. LCFF is designed to close long-standing funding gaps between rich and poor districts by directing supplementary funding to low-income students, English learners, and foster youth. Districts with concentrations of students in poverty will receive even more dollars. This is a historic reform that was sold by the governor and legislative leaders as a way to improve outcomes for low-income students and English learners. Unfortunately, the promise of LCFF may not be achieved because of a series of last-minute changes in the legislature that watered down requirements to spend additional funding for high-need students in their classrooms and schools.

Previously, the governor’s LCFF model contained strong language requiring districts to use supplementary funding for the benefit of low-income students and English learners. Districts had to direct these funds to schools based on the proportion of disadvantaged students in those schools, and faced penalties for misusing the dollars. This system would have increased financial transparency and provided information on how much of education funding actually reached the school level.

The current legislation weakened all of these requirements. While the previous model clearly stated that disadvantaged students would be the primary beneficiaries of supplementary funding, the current version of LCFF vaguely suggests that services for needy students must increase. Even worse, it potentially allows districts to spend these dollars on initiatives where the majority of the beneficiaries are not disadvantaged. This means that a district could purchase instructional materials for all students with funding designed to increase services for disadvantaged students. There are no penalties for misusing the funds and limited transparency for the public.

Superintendents, school boards, and other central office special interest groups who sought these changes argue that they should be given maximum spending flexibility and then be judged on their results. But LCFF’s accountability measures for student outcomes do not kick in for three to four years, allowing districts near full reign with supplementary funding with little recourse for parents and community members.

In fact, there is no evidence in research that giving full spending flexibility to district central offices will ever close achievement or opportunity gaps. Instead of providing the highest need students with academic supports, such as an extended school year, and socio-emotional supports, such as mental health services, superintendents and schools boards will be under tremendous pressure to use supplementary funds to increase staff salaries and implement one-size-fits-all district initiatives like class size reduction. These decisions could divert critical funding away from disadvantaged students and undermine public faith in this historic reform.

Fortunately, there is still time to fix LCFF. At a state level, legislators have a few months to pass legislation that will increase financial transparency and create stronger assurances that additional funding will benefit high-need students. In addition, important decisions on the use of supplementary funding have been delegated to the California State Board of Education. To prevent Sacramento insiders from controlling the results of their deliberations, parents and community members throughout California must make their voices heard at State Board meetings.

At a local level, parents and community members must press on school boards and superintendents to work on behalf of kids rather than special interests. Instead of mandating top-down approaches, school boards and superintendents should take a page from the Governor’s book and allow school communities to decide how to spend additional funding to improve educational outcomes for low income students, foster youth and English learners with real accountability for results.

From the very start, LCFF was billed as a way to solve long-standing educational inequities and provide disadvantaged children with more support. By raising our voices on behalf of our most vulnerable students, we can hold Sacramento and local school districts accountable for keeping that promise.